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Talking Comparison: Tanya Marie Luhrmann

On Thursday, November 7, Comparative Methodologies is thrilled to host Tanya Marie Luhrmann as part of its Talking Comparison speaker series, which invites èצӰÏñ scholars to discuss the role of comparison in their work.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at èצӰÏñ, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing. At the heart of the work is the sense of being called, and its possibilities and burden.

She is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness, and How God Becomes Real, and is currently at work on a book entitled Voices.

RSVP at the link below:

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